The lurid Italian horror movies of the 1970s were called giallo (yellow) after the colour of the covers in which the original books appeared in the 1930s, and this Franco-Belgian homage to them invites, indeed compels, the viewer's participation. It unfolds in three chapters over some 30 years at a grand mansion on a cliff overlooking the Côte d'Azur. In the first part, the young Ana is terrified by the family's witch-like housekeeper, is fascinated by the corpse of her grandfather (from whose deathly clutches she wrenches a watch) and sees her parents having sex.

In the second chapter, the adolescent Ana leaves the house to accompany her sexually competitive mother to the hairdresser and is drawn, to her mother's horror, towards a motorcycle gang. In the final, most compelling episode, the grown-up Ana returns to the empty, decaying house where her sexual fantasies merge with reality in a violent, bloody, ambiguous conclusion.

This is basic movie Freud, elegantly mounted. The soundtrack (footsteps, dripping taps, creaking doors, banging shutters) is ominously exaggerated. The close-ups are extreme. Colours change melodramatically to fit the shifting moods. The music is borrowed from old horror films. The dialogue is at first sparse, then non-existent. Luis Buñuel (sliced eyeballs, insects crawling out of bodies), Mario Bava and Dario Argento are affectionately alluded to. Viewers are left to create their own narratives or absorb the events into their own dreams and nightmares. This is art-house horror, a pure cinema for connoisseurs, a return to late-19th-century decadence.